How To Become A Highly Sought DevOps Professional

According to this data, DevOps is projected to be the second highest-paying software engineering job in 2025. I’m here to share insights on becoming a highly sought-after DevOps professional, drawing from my firsthand experience as a technology leader in the industry. I practice DevOps, Cloud Computing, Coding, and SRE. When I began, I took the longer path, but now I’m here to guide you on the quicker route to becoming a DevOps expert.

If you're a professional aiming for a major change or advancement in your career, feeling stuck in a job where nothing progresses, or seeking new excitement and growth, then this article "How To Become A Highly Sought DevOps Professional" is tailored for you. I am assuming that you have a foundational background in IT and understand technology basics. This is not a tutorial but rather career advice from someone who managed to transform 20 IT professionals to successful DevOps engineers ground up.

Let us begin discussing How To Become A Highly Sought DevOps Professional:

Step 1: Learn Linux, Duration 1 Month

Linux serves as the backbone of DevOps. When establishing and maintaining your DevOps environment, nearly all commands are run on Linux. Regardless of the Linux distribution you choose, it's essential to develop strong Linux skills. The Linux Foundation offers excellent learning resources for Linux. Dedicate at least 10 hours each week for a month to build a decent understanding of Linux.

Step 2: Learn Cloud Computing, Duration 3 Months

When you work in DevOps, approximately 30% of your time is spent building and maintaining infrastructure. Building infrastructure on-premises is hard, costly, and time-consuming. That is why you need to learn cloud computing. Cloud computing allows DevOps to build virtual infrastructure so that one can focus on using the infrastructure virtually rather than building, configuring, and maintaining it physically. Not to mention, building infrastructure is costly because you have to buy the hardware; in the cloud, you just have to subscribe to the hardware for your DevOps use. A good starting point to learn cloud is by completing two courses in AWS (certification is optional), namely: AWS Cloud Practitioner and AWS Solutions Architect Associate. Spend roughly three months of learning for both.

Step 3: Learn Docker, 1 Month

Docker is a technology that allows your application to be deployed into an independent standalone lightweight package that can run to virtualized environment and remain compatible wether that is public cloud, private cloud, or even your laptop and desktop. As you progress in your DevOps journey, you would encounter that almost all apps are deployed using Docker in the production(Virtual Machine or Kubernetes). This link from Docker is a good tutorial to learn Docker.

Step 4: Learn Kubernetes, in 2 Months

At this point, you are halfway to becoming a true DevOps professional. Kubernetes is a technology that allows you to run and manage your Docker application such that it becomes self healing and self scaling. Kubernetes makes your application meet zero downtime. A mandatory requirement of DevOps specially during deployment. In technical terms, Kubernetes is a Docker orchestrator. To learn Kubernetes, this is a good basic tutorial in Udemy. Spend 1 month learning basic Kubernetes. Certification is optional.

Step 5: Learn to Automate Infrastructure Provisioning, 1 Month

Currently, you've been manually building (provisioning and configuring) infrastructure. This approach is acceptable, but as you advance in your DevOps career, it becomes repetitive and leads to rework. In real-world scenarios, 70% of errors stem from manual efforts, such as infrastructure misconfigurations during provisioning. A fundamental concept in DevOps is to automate whenever possible to minimize errors and rework. Therefore, learning Infrastructure as Code(IaC) is essential to becoming a proficient DevOps professional. This approach allows DevOps engineers to create infrastructure by writing code instead of doing it manually, IaC simply turns codes and configurations to infrastructure. Terraform is an excellent Infrastructure as Code tool for DevOps. Dedicate one month to learning Terraform. Additionally, incorporate Helm into your learning. Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes, which makes installing packages in Kubernetes easier.

Step 6: Learn CICD Pipeline, 2 Months

CICD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Development Pipeline. It is a paradigm and technology that automated and integrates all the release process of app from coding to production. This is the mainstay of DevOps. So far, we've still shipping code to Production semi-automated, or it maybe automated but it does not tie the release process all together. Learn GitLab or Jenkins to learn CICD. If short of a time, ArgoCD can be used instead but it mainly focuses on deployment. This will take you a month or two to familiarized.

Step 7: Learn Basic Coding Skills and Git, 2 Months

As a DevOps engineer, your main interface is the Developers. You should have a basic understanding of their development and release process. To do so, you need to learn Git so that you have an idea of different branching strategies, which are essential in building a CI/CD pipeline. It is crucial to learn basic coding skills because, during your career in DevOps, you will often need to troubleshoot why applications are crashing during issue investigation. Having coding skills will help you a lot during issue resolution since you often need to debug alongside Developers and interpret logs. A good programming language is Python or GoLang. Furthermore, you can use these programming skills to automate some of your DevOps work. You do not need to be expert in coding, just get a good understanding on any programming language of your choice.

Final Words

After completing your transformation in 12 months, you need to create a capstone project. This capstone project is a way for you to showcase your skill from a prospective recruiter or a hiring manager. It creates a brand awareness for your self in the industry and be labeled as a thought leader. If you follow everything I say, you would probably land your dream DevOps job and receive a decent salary. This steps are not guarantee but based on my experience were proven effective. There is no cutting of corners in becoming DevOps, avoid the trap of changing your title to DevOps yet know nothing in DevOps. You may also read my similar blog post in the past "step-by-step-guide-how-to-become-a-real-devops-professional".